Elfreth Announces Winner of 2025 Congressional App Challenge

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Congresswoman Sarah Elfreth (MD-03) announced the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for high school and middle school students in Maryland’s Third Congressional District. Matthew Yang of Centennial High School in Ellicott City won the Third District 2025 Congressional App Challenge with his app CellposeCellCounter, an AI-driven microscopy analysis tool that automatically detects and counts cells in biological images. Elfreth called Matthew with the good news, and the video can be accessed HERE.

“Congratulations to Matthew for winning the Third District 2025 Congressional App Challenge. This challenge allows us to highlight the incredible innovation and talent of our young students, and Matthew’s skills to advance scientific research here in Maryland shined through. I also would like to extend a special thank you to all our judges whose expertise and insights made this competition possible,” said Congresswoman Elfreth.

Matthew was inspired to create CellposeCellCounter from his time interning at Dr. Liang’s lab in the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this experience, Matthew realized how crucial cell count is for reproducible research but all current methods for collecting this critical data are tedious and costly. His app aims to be an accessible solution that can automatically measure cell metrics from a single uploaded photo using AI models. The app can provide researchers with key metrics, including total cell count, viability percentage, and cell confluency. Matthew has made his app open-source on Hugging Face Spaces, allowing free and accessible use to all scientists. 

As the Third District’s winner, Matthew will have CellposeCellCounter displayed on the national Congressional App Challenge website and is invited to the House of Code event in Washington, DC, with winners across the nation. 

Elfreth’s office had the largest applicant pool of any freshman office participating in the Congressional App Challenge this year and was among the top 20% applicant-wise of all offices. The winners of the challenge were chosen by a panel of judges who made their decision based on the app’s purpose, concept, technicality, creativity, and design. 

The Congressional App Challenge is an annual, nationwide event for middle school and high school students that encourages them to explore coding and computer science through hands-on practice with the creation of their own apps. This challenge is open to all middle and high school students who either reside or attend school in Maryland’s Third District.   

You can learn more about the Congressional App Challenge HERE. 

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